WAR FOR THE MIND

El Greco - Fable (1580)

By Edoardo Innaro

Studio Orma opens the 2026 season by adopting War for the Mind as its curatorial formula and, at the same time, as a diagnosis of the present. This is not an invitation to conflict, but the recognition that the decisive terrain of contemporaneity has become the very interior of experience. "War" doesn't happen elsewhere, nor in a remote place between armies on the other side of the planet; it happens here, or

now, within the daily fabric of our perceptions, our desires, our fears and beliefs.

If the grenade was thrown long ago, today the battle is decided in the minute form of gestures: in what we choose to look at, in what we let pass without understanding, in what excites and consumes us, in what divides and immobilizes us. In this sense, the mind is not only a psychological place, but also a cultural, political, and aesthetic terrain. It is the most contested land because it is the most precious material; the ultimate treasure is not the opinion we display, but the quality of attention with which we inhabit the world.

Complacency, then, is not innocence, it is surrender. Every moment we neglect to defend the mind—understood as the ability to discern, to pause in the complex, to avoid being swept away by automatism—gives space to that which wishes to govern us. These forces are not an easily identifiable external figure; they are both outside and inside us. Outside, because they come from every direction: from the closest and most emotional relationships to the great structures that organize society, from family to politics, from sex to ideologies, from religious affiliations. Inside, because they are effective only when they encounter our blind spots, our repetitive frailties, our unconscious rituals.

Frank Kafka - Drawings (1901-1906)

Their strategies, however different, tend to produce the same outcome: the impossibility of a real presence. Distracting, exciting, enraging, dividing, frightening are all techniques for composing the contemporary subject. They want an individual in emotional dysfunction, too excited to think clearly, too enraged to reason, too terrified to act, too distracted to notice, too divided to unite. It is here that the recent history of art—after the urgency and necessity of protest art, after denunciation and external struggle—reaches a turning point: not because the social dimension is abandoned, but because it becomes clear that without internal work, protest risks being reduced to a predictable, consumable, and therefore integrable language.

The worst enemy, from this perspective, is not a demonized figure "out there," but the part of ourselves that renounces transformation. It is the beliefs that harden to the point of preventing us from evaluating ourselves, from truly reexamining our beliefs, from growing; it is the inertia that disguises itself as realism; it is the gentle degradation of the body that numbs the mind; it is the self-absorption that persuades us we already know; it is the emotionality that mistakes intensity for truth; it is the consolatory rhetoric of "you're perfect just the way you are" when it becomes an excuse for not changing; and it is, conversely, the self-hatred that finds no peace and demands only new reasons to remain the same.

In this scenario, Studio Orma chooses not to simply produce a commentary on the times, but to assume a specific curatorial responsibility: to treat art as a practice of attention and a device for transformation, capable of influencing perceptual systems even before opinions. Declaring "war for the mind" here means declaring a research program: defending the ability to think without slogans, to feel without being possessed by emotion, to take a stand without becoming a caricature of a position. It means restoring to artistic practice its less spectacular and more radical strength: that of reconstructing the conditions of inner freedom as a common good, not a private luxury.

MC Escher - Genesis, Day Four (1938)

For this reason, the beginning is not a thesis, but a gesture: asking "the question." The question is the first line of defense, the digging of trenches; it is the seed of doubt as a hygiene of the imagination, the place where reflection can begin, the preparation of the battlefield. Studio Orma understands the authentic question as a form of participation: not a conceptual ornament, but an invitation to open up, to observe, to journey with what cannot be immediately possessed. In a culture that prizes quick answers and impermeable identities, the question becomes an act of discipline and courage.

This leads to a choice of "grammars of art"—a set of priorities that guide works, formats, conversations, and bodies in attendance. Studio Orma seeks practices that refocus on the human as a skill: manual skill, memory, exercised sensitivity, the ability to exist in time. It seeks a complexity that is not erudite complacency, but resistance to simplification.

moral and aesthetic vocation. It seeks a community that is not merely public consumption, but a relational fabric capable of transcending differences and generations. And, finally, it seeks an idea of spirituality not as an escape from reality, but as a reactivation of the deepest dimensions of experience—dream, emotion, interiority—treated as the material of art and as a resource for a transformation that never ends.